for the Period Ended 31 December 2020
Directors report | |
Profit and loss | |
Balance sheet | |
Additional notes | |
Balance sheet notes | |
Community Interest Report |
Directors' report period ended
The directors present their report with the financial statements of the company for the period ended 31 December 2020
Principal activities of the company
Additional information
2020 was an incredibly difficult and challenging year for everybody. The impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on lives and livelihoods across the world was huge. We consider ourselves to be extremely fortunate and our thoughts are with the many who have suffered through these difficult times. We have had to become more inward looking to adapt but we are proud that we have also managed to contribute in small ways to help others affected by the pandemic. We did feel the impact of this year, both personally and as an organisation. Most notably, we very sadly lost our friend and colleague Zobinou "Zed" Mawusi in May 2020. Zed had been supporting agriculture research projects to achieve better outcomes in the West Africa region for over 10 years and was a close personal friend to some of us. When the pandemic hit in March 2020 much of our usual work, which relied on face-to-face interactions in Africa, disappeared overnight as international travel was halted. We had to rapidly reinvent ourselves to survive. We were fortunate to be able to extend aspects of our work which could be carried out remotely, most notably development of digital solutions. We took the initiative to support our partners technology needs during the lockdowns, and there were instances where additional funding followed. These relationships of shared responsibility enabled much needed flexibility during these uncertain times. At the beginning of 2020 we employed our first full-time team members, which came with a notable increase in responsibility for us as directors. This coincided with additional responsibilities in projects with bigger partners aiming to work at large scales with big impact, which further increased pressure to deliver. The timing of this increased responsibility made it a baptism by fire due to the impact of the pandemic. Although there have been growing pains along the way, we are pleased to have made this institutional leap. The shift to remote working affected the support offered to our partners in Africa. Capacity building efforts that we would usually do in person were no longer possible. We continued to engage them by finding components of the work they could take responsibility for and supported them to mitigate the effects of the pandemic, backstopping their cash flow. However, we recognise that the shift to remote work was much more challenging in their environments. In 2020 we prioritised responding to emerging needs brought on by the Covid pandemic which affected our previous social impact focus on capacity building of African partners. The urgent needs emerging during lockdowns were varied and we responded whenever we could. This included offering our expertise in developing remote learning tools and open education resources to partners in the UK and beyond. Highlights included support for a remote learning GCSE to A Level bridging course for mathematics in UK schools and the creation of a phygital ecosystem to support virtual maths camps in Africa. We were set for a year of breakthroughs and growth in 2020, with our largest contracts to date secured and a busy schedule in place. We came out of the year having maintained growth, taken on a manageable debt from an essential cash flow loan and survived the transformation of our work with a positive outlook for the future. We enter 2021 under pressure to deliver on our big projects and maintaining growth will be essential to meet our expanding commitments. We are seeing our growth translate into increased impact potential, and this is what drives and motivates us in our work.Overview About IDEMS IDEMS International (IDEMS) is a not-for-profit company devoted to Innovations in Development, Education, and the Mathematical Sciences. Our mission is to work collaboratively with diverse partners to enable the evolution of innovations which can impact lives all over the world. IDEMS International was founded in 2018, by mathematical scientists with long term experience working in education and development, looking to achieve wider impact beyond academia. We are passionate about projects related to development, education, and the mathematical sciences, and particularly work that can impact more than one of these areas. As a company we are motivated by our social mission, transparency in our accounting and guided by our principles. IDEMS International is legally registered in the UK as a Community Interest Company. This structure enables us to be defined by the communities we serve while doing business commercially. Serving a community gives us a sense of purpose beyond our own self-interest as individuals, or even as a company. IDEMS International supports and collaborates with INNODEMS, which was established by our partners in Kenya in 2019. INNODEMS follows a similar business model to IDEMS International as a route to creating sustainable opportunities for our Kenyan colleagues. Our Team This was a transformative growth year for our team. At the end of 2019 we welcomed our first additional full-time employee in the UK. By the end of this year, we had a further two full time employees in the UK, making a total of five, plus a UK-based subcontractor and new collaborators in Italy, the Netherlands, and the USA. The Kenyan teams we support also expanded, and we gained an additional collaborator in Uganda. We also continued working with team members in West Africa, with Francis in Ghana, and with Zed, in Niger, who sadly passed away in May 2020. In 2020 we launched our Post-Doctoral Impact Activation Fellowships, which saw us recruit two recent PhD graduates to work with IDEMS. These fellowships provide opportunities for PhD graduates to convert their academic expertise into skills which are of value to socially impactful initiatives, while also having opportunities to engage in research activities. We ended the year by launching a new recruitment process to expand our software development team, both for a specific upcoming project, and for our growing general software development needs. In May 2020 we were saddened by the sudden loss of Zobinou "Zed" Mawusi. Zed was our Research Methods Assistant for the Collaborative Crops Research Program in West Africa. Zed provided vital local support to the projects in Niger and the West Africa region, to complement the international based support. He was dedicated in his work and valued the importance of his role in improving agriculture research in the region. Zed was an extremely friendly and supportive person, who was always fun to be around and well respected and appreciated by all those who interacted with him. He is greatly missed. Major activities In 2020 there was an increase in activities related to open source software development. This became our largest area of work, overtaking our consultancy work. Parenting for Lifelong Health (PLH) Digital, consisting of the design and development of a parenting app with the University of Oxford and other partners, became our largest single project. It was continuously stimulating and challenging work which adapted to the challenges of Covid. The project helped drive organisational growth, enabling us to build our technical team. This has opened a whole new area of meaningful work and collaborations which we value highly. Consultancy contracts remained as a core component of our work as we continued ongoing relationships with our collaborators. A highlight was establishing a three-year agreement based with the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) to support training on climatic analysis, including with R-Instat. This work has enabled us to develop training materials that could serve a wide user base going forward. There was a big demand for our community work this year, particularly due to Covid disruptions. However, it was difficult to adapt to the changing needs, so not all interventions were impactful. The most successful intervention was actually for a UK school where we supported remote learning of mathematics. Our biggest effort was to work with the charity Supporting African Maths Initiatives (SAMI) to create a virtual maths camp to replace the cancelled camps across Africa. We also put a lot of effort into ‘Soma Nyumbani’, an imaginative initiative to support Kenyan teachers who were required by the government to provide home study learning to mitigate the Covid disruption of schools. Just as this started getting used by teachers but before the impact could be felt, the Kenyan government changed the policy and schools reopened, highlighting the challenges of emergency responses. Finances IDEMS International ended year three with a small surplus for the third consecutive year. We had an increased turnover of £310,000 and a surplus of £9,400 after impact investments and donations. Our full accounts are provided for transparency. The Covid-19 pandemic changed many of our activities and ways of operating this year, most notably with a large reduction in travel and subsistence costs compared to last year. To support cash flow during the pandemic, we obtained a £50,000 coronavirus Bounce Back Loan Scheme. We expanded our team in response to new work with staff and subcontractor costs increasing from last year. Creditors amounts and cash in hand are high as we are currently holding multi-year grant funds in a dedicated account, which includes unspent funds due to Covid disruptions. We donated £2,900 to the charity Supporting African Maths Initiatives (SAMI). £2,000 of this was unrestricted, and £900 was to support maths camp activities. We provided a zero-interest loan of £13,700 to INNODEMS, our partners in Kenya, to help them establish and build up their team and activities. We also invested in education activities in the UK and Africa as emergency responses to Covid. Reflection points Our diverse project ecosystem makes us resilient We have deliberately built up a diverse portfolio of projects. This came largely from our experience working in Africa where the operating environment can change suddenly and unpredictably. This diversity served us well when the pandemic hit as we were able to rebalance our efforts. A lot of work was simply put on hold, which enabled us to increase our investment support where the Covid-19 situation was placing high demand on our partners. Our response to the impacts of Covid led to further diversification of our portfolio which we hope will, in turn, increase our ability to adapt in the future. Our recruitment strategy can be refined Our growth and recruitment carried out this year helped us more clearly understand the types of team members we can enable to thrive within our structures at this stage of the organisation’s life cycle. Our projects require solving novel and challenging problems, which are often hard to constrain or clearly and require an appreciation and experience of dealing with complexity. We found these characteristics in academics, familiar with innovative work, and in industry veterans, with a history of working on complex projects, and these two groups generate synergies when working together. This insight informs us as we enter our next recruitment cycle. Debt is a useful growth supporting tool At the start of 2020, we had low debt levels and our perception of debt was largely negative. As we end the year having grown and looking to maintain growth over the next few years, we have begun to recognise the value of debt as a useful tool to support cash flow while enabling growth. The effects of Covid triggered cash flow issues in mid-2020, which were solved through a Coronavirus Bounce Back Loan. Despite the fact that we remained profitable over the year, the additional debt was essential in supporting operations during unpredicted invoicing delays. We appreciate the usefulness of sensible, well managed debt, and we are now open to considering further debt options as part of our growth plans in 2021 and beyond. For example, we could consider a loan to fund additional Post-Doctoral Impact Activation Fellowships, this would enable recruitment of talent, and time to get fellows ready for new projects, supporting further growth. Looking ahead We expected the first 6 months of 2021 to be intense. We need to meet the deadlines of our new and existing contracts, most notably with the University of Oxford and UNICEF, while continuing to build our reputation for quality and reliability. Achieving this would solidify our growing partnerships and prepare us to take on further challenges. We are continuing to expand our team to support this and other work and have started an open recruitment process for this. We hope that the second 6 months of 2021 will be a period with fewer urgent deadlines, enabling us to consolidate, focus on longer-term projects and investment activities. This should also give team members the time and space to develop skills and pursue projects of personal interest. We expect to end 2021 larger and more mature, with improved structures and processes that are appropriate for the increased size and complexity of our organisation. 2021 should be a year of consolidation, following this year’s transformation.
Directors
The directors shown below have held office during the whole of the period from
1 February 2020 to 31 December 2020
The above report has been prepared in accordance with the special provisions in part 15 of the Companies Act 2006
This report was approved by the board of directors on
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Status: Director
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This report was approved by the board of directors on
and signed on behalf of the board by:
Name:
Status: Director
The notes form part of these financial statements
for the Period Ended 31 December 2020
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The company has carried out a wide range of projects and activities this year related to development, education and the mathematical sciences. In particular, a number of activities were responding to emerging needs related to the Covid-19 pandemic. During the financial year ending 31 December 2020 the companies activities have benefited the community in the follow ways:We are supporting initiatives across Africa in agroecology and agriculture. In Kenya, we continue to support an Agroecology Hub, aiming to support local organisations to develop the necessary structures that could enable them to support the wider farming community across East Africa through the use of effective agroecological approaches. The AE Hub's activitieswere highly disrupted this year by Covid. However, a number of activities and progress was made throughout the year. We were able to obtain grant funding to support a number of improvements to Manor House Agricultural Centre's infrastructure, as the anchor of the AEHub, in order to transform Manor House into a more ecological, sustainable and environmentally conscious centre. Improvements included installation of biogas systems and energy efficient cooking equipment for kitchens and an improved water filtration and storagesystem. We were also able to support a social learning project for members of farmer research networks through activities using distributed smart phones and the development of fact sheets for farmers on AE practices through training for AE Hub partners on written andvideo communication. We have also continued to provide research methods supports to agriculture research projects in West Africa, which moved to remote support in 2020. These projects are improving access to local, sustainable, nutritious food through collaborativeresearch and knowledge-sharing with smallholder famers, research institutions and development organisations. They have an overarching aim to explore solutions for sustainable, local food systems to improve the lives of people in some of the poorest parts of the world. We support these projects in all aspects of research methods (statistics and data).We continue our develop open source software and open educational resources to support climate and climate change research with the aim of making it easier to access and use climate data and information. These activities include developing free, online training materials with EUMETSAT on the use of free satellite data for climate monitoring, supporting the development Climsoft: a free, climate database management software for use by national meteorological services around the world, supporting the development OpenCDMS, a WorldMeteorological Organisation initiative working to address Earth system data management needs of developing and developed countries, and we are developing free tools to analyse climatic data (R-Instat). Our variety of climate projects aim to improve understanding of climate and climate change among researchers, government organisations, farmers andothers with the aim of supporting more informed decision making in adapting and tackling changes in climate. This year we collaborated with the University of Oxford to develop Parenting of Lifelong Health (PLH) Digital. Parenting for Lifelong Health (PLH) is a suite of open access, noncommercial parenting workshop programmes, developed by the University of Oxford and other collaborators, including WHO, Clowns Without Borders South Africa (CWBSA), UNICEF and the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Workshops for parents and their childrenusing the PLH resources have been run by various non-governmental organisations around the world to support families in their communities. Studies have shown that the workshops have many positive effects on the families that attend them, improving mental health and wellbeing and reducing violence in the home. Programmes are now being scaled in several countries but the demand for these programmes far outweighs the capacity to reach everyone through face-to-face workshops.PLH Digital will extend the reach and impact of these efforts by creating a free mobile PLH app, based on existing PLH resources, with the potential to reach millions of families. IDEMS is leading the development of the app in this long-term project, spanning four years, and including multiple co-development and testing cycles across countries with a formalrandomised controlled trial to support rigorous evidence and research outputs. The app will be a low-data offline-first application that will work on the most basic smartphones to ensure it can reach as many families as possible and those most in need. We are also including a significant amount of capacity building within the project to enable our partners in Kenya to contribute to the software development of the app and take a key role in the project.IDEMS also worked with the University of Oxford in their emergency responses to Covid. During Covid, there was a huge demand for parenting resources, particularly in places where lockdowns were enforced as this increased family stress and the risk of domestic violence. Our role in their Covid response was to redevelop the Covid 19 Parenting website, makingresources available through and to su port the development of ParentText, a chatbot basedmessaging intervention. We supported the translation of "tips" sheets into over 100 languages and the resources shared by the PLH team have reached over 200 million people around the world.This year we have also supported a number of education initiatives and in particular responses to the challenges of school closures and remote learning in the UK and in Africa.- Covid disruptions in the UK this year led to school students learning from home for long periods of time, and end of year exams being cancelled. We worked with maths teachers to develop a free, online A Level Mathematics bridging course designed to prepare students making the transition to A Level Mathematics. The course was created in Moodle and included a variety of resources including interactive questions in STACK, GeoGebra activities, useful links and other materials. The course was shared freely with a number of schools during the year. Feedback from the teachers and students highlighted in particular the appreciation for the interactive questions which allowed students to practice and test their understanding.- In Kenya, we jointly developed and ran a 21st Century Skills course for high school leavers as an effort to equip them with modern day skills useful for further studies and gaining employment. Skills taught on the course included foundations of coding/programming, data literacy, critical and logical thinking, communication, presentation and media making skills. The course ran twice in early 2020 for 10-15participants in each cohort before Covid prevent further courses running. As the Covid pandemic hit in Kenya, we began developing freely available community-based learning resources in response to the Kenyan goverment's decision to embrace the idea of a community-based learning approach to engage learners within their communities during the COVID-19 school closures. We began to share these resources with teachers and students in Kenya, however, government policy changed and schools were reopened, hence the programme did not achieve the full impactintended.- With the UK charity Supporting African Maths Initiatives we developed the Virtual Maths Camps. Virtual Maths Camps is an idea to turn the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic into opportunities, and continue to provide a maths camp experience for students, teachers, and facilitators from across the globe - in a new, dynamic, partially virtual and fully international environment. IDEMS was involved in all aspects of designing Virtual Maths Camps content including supporting the design of a card deck where every card features a unique game, puzzle or fun mathematical fact, and developing a chatbot system for students to interact with mathematical content, solve puzzles and learn new facts. The resources began to be used successfully for virtual events in Kenya and Ghana in 2020 with more events planned in Togo, Benin, Ethiopia and other countries in 2021.A full list of the company's projects are provided in the Directors' Report section of the full accounts.
This year was challenging for many people and there were a number of emerging issues that were faced by members of our community. We actively engaged with selected stakeholders from our community and made efforts to support them in addressing issues particularlyrelated to the Covid-19 pandemic.IDEMS has continued to support and engage with the UK charity SAMI and the Kenyan NGO AMI. SAMI's big activity this year was virtual Maths Camps. This was a direct response to the Covid pandemic due to the inability to hold physical maths camps across Africa. SAMI approached IDEMS to support the development of resources for the Virtual Maths Camp and IDEMS made substantial staff time available towards this effort and provided funds for subcontractor contributions. Staff time to provide our expertise was the biggest need and contribution we made to SAMI this year. We also donated £2,900 of funds to SAMI to further support its activities. Early in 2020, SAMI requested support in developing a Theory of Change, which it could use to apply for funding to other organisations. IDEMS offered to run sessions to develop a Theory of Change and led a number of sessions to help develop this with SAMI, at no cost. IDEMS staff attended SAMI's annual general meeting to ensure that wecontinue to understand how the company can best support them in improving mathematics education across Africa.AMI also requested support from IDEMS to support new education initiatives. IDEMS worked with AMI to develop a 21st Century Skills course for high school leavers in Kenya. This was designed to address the need for young people in Kenya to be equipped with skills of the future, including foundations of coding/programming, data literacy, critical and logical thinking, communication, presentation and media making skills, which are often lacking in formal education. We supported AMI in running this course, before the pandemic hit, and also provided capacity support in order for the AMI team to run lead the running of these courses. We succeeded in this effort as AMI led a second running of the course, with remote support from IDEMS. As the pandemic hit and Kenyan schools were closed, AMI approached us to support an initiative to develop resources for community-based learning. We worked with AMI to develop these resources and began to share then freely with teachers and students. However, the high levels of uncertainty at that time prevented the project achieving its impact, as government policy suddenly changed, and schools reopened. A new stakeholder this year was INNODEMS, a not-for-profit company established in Kenya by members of AMI and set up with a similar structure to IDEMS International. We supported INNODEMS in establishing itself this year and involved them in our projects as part of our capacity building efforts. Capacity building for our partners has been a big part of our support for the community since IDEMS was established. However, this year our capacity building strategy had to adapt as we could not carry out in person activities as planned. We continued to provide capacity building support through remotely collaborations and use of online collaboration tools. In 2019, a large proportion of our community support and engagement was stakeholders in the mathematics education community was through conferences and workshop in Africa as connection building events. This year it was not possible to host such events. We were able to continue to engage with Maseno University to support their use of electronic assessment for mathematics courses. We were also able to respond to requests from mathematics teacher in UK schools to provide support for remote learning of mathematics. This is an area where there would normally not be such a need for our support, however the unique circumstances of the pandemic drove this need. We were able to respond by producing and providing free access to learning materials and electronic assessment quizzes which enabled students toget automated feedback for self-learning. We continued to have consultation with agriculture, ecology and farmer-based organisations in East Africa as part of the Agroecology Hub project. IDEMS supports an Agroecology Hub, which was established in 2018 at Manor House Agricultural Centre, Kitale, Kenya. This community is looking to work together on using Farmer Research Network approaches to build the scientific knowledge base while engaging farming communities with agroecological practices. This year's activities were heavily affected by Covid, and we were not able to support in-person events as we did last year. However, we continued to engage with the AEHub partners and continued to provide support, with the main focus being to support the organisations to continue their activities and survive the Covid pandemic. We look forward to continuing to support the AE Hub activities and partners and contribute our experience in Farmer Research Networks to the community.
The aggregate amount of emoluments paid to or receivable by directors in respect of qualifying services was £51,640.The value of company contributions to a pension scheme in respect of directors' qualifying services was £9,295.There were no other transactions or arrangements in connection with the remuneration of directors or compensation for directors' loss of office which is required to be disclosed.Full details are provided in the company's accounts.
Donations totalling £2,900 were made to the charity Supporting African Maths Initiative, charity number: 1161994.The charity is an asset-locked body which is specified in the company's articles of association.
This report was approved by the board of directors on
24 September 2021
And signed on behalf of the board by:
Name: D Parsons
Status: Director